Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Friday, October 31, 2003

Lessons From Paul Richards Part I: More with More

The Baltimore Sun is doing a retrospective series on Oriole
baseball, and their recent
piece on Paul Richards, while by no means scratching the
surface of the guy's management acumen, is a good read and
replete with some fun details.

Before he petered out, Richards
built a strong organization in Chicago and then turned Baltimore
into a long-term very competitive franchise, both in the 1950s.
He did this by combining a determinedly experimental mind and the
cojones to try out his ideas without regard to how
others might feel and without spending serious time worrying
about whether it might be what my buddy Dave Perkins calls a CLM
(Career-Limiting Move). As many of you already know, most big
organizations punish managers' experimental innovation; if a
manager faces a situation and uses the standard operating
procedure and it fails, it's not her fault. If her peer tries an
experimental innovation in an identical situation, it's her
failure and the organization will stick it to her as a
career-long tar baby. So to implement changes in most big
organizations, you have to care more about results than career
enhancement. Paul Richards was the poster boy for that.

COOL PAUL
RICHARDS FACT: He has the best & most appropriate middle
name of anyone in major league history. For a guy with a
razor-sharp mind and aggressive goal-oriented operational
persona, he was lucky to have the middle name Rapier.

There are a lot of great and good management lessons from
Richards, but one of them was featured in the Sun article so I'll
elaborate on it today. He realized that sometimes executive
management can have a strategic approach that's both a proven
failure, and at the same time unquestioned as a course to follow.

When Richards came to the Orioles in 1955, they were long-term
league sad-sacks recently moved from St. Louis where they'd
played as the Browns. The Browns were poor enough to need to
move. Except for a pennant during WWII (when all the rosters were
wacky and peppered with guys who would have been lucky to play if
a war hadn't siphoned off a lot of prime talent), it had been
decades since the franchise fielded competitive teams in
back-to-back years. Ownership thought of themselves as stewards
of bad baseball that had to be bad because you didn't have a lot
of money to spend. So the teams were bad, attendance was weaker
than it would have been with stronger teams (St. Louis and
Baltimore were, and St. Louis still is, incredibly strong hotbeds
of baseball interest & knowledge per-capita). As a team
accountant recounted to Sun reporter John Eisenberg:

The franchise had been a dispirited,
penny-pinching loser in St. Louis and was on its way to
losing 100 games in its first season in Baltimore when
Richards was hired in a dual role, replacing Jimmy Dykes as
manager and Arthur Ehlers as general manager.

"We had operated very conservatively
that ['54] season," Hamper [the accountant] said.
"The mind-set was clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox had
the big bucks, and we were not in that category." The
Orioles owners and club president Clarence Miles were
neophytes who had pledged to spend "whatever it
takes" to win, but they didn't know where or how much to
invest.

Richards showed them. As the major
leagues' first manager/GM since John McGraw, who ran the New
York Giants from 1902 to 1932, he took liberal advantage of
his unchecked authority to deal and spend. "Overnight,
we went from a conservative organization to a very aggressive
and, in some respects, reckless organization," Hamper
said. "It was a complete change in philosophy and a
nightmare for those of us on the financial side, but the end
result was the mentality that we were competitive and weren't
going to back off."

The article mentioned that lot of Richards' experiments didn't
work out, but what later came to be known as The Oriole Way, a
mix of strategy & tactics that were only neutralized by
widespread imitation, was Richards' formulation.

Frequently a company that was a success in a specific economic
and cultural milieu comes to believe it was successful because it
is, itself, successful. But it's not. It's successful in that
environment. In the early market for microcomputers dedicated
to business uses, IBM became very successful in both margin &
in sales volume. They thought of themselves as unbeatable. But
their success was a combination of image (most non-computer-savvy
finance people...the ones cutting purchase orders...thought of
IBM as computers the way most people think of Jello as
the entire cornucopia of gelatin-based dessert substances.). When
companies started offering imitations for less, imitations with
extra features for the same or less, they made small inroads.
When people got used to desktop computers, the mystique
evaporated as quickly as a World Series rally hinging on an
Alfonso Soriano at-bat. It wasn't that IBM was, as an
organization, a success in microcomputers, it was that they were
a success in that environment.

The reverse can be true, too. A company, like Radio Shack, that
learns to compete on price and selection, can miss out on
high-margin opportunities because they are constrained, like the
St. Louis Browns/pre-Richards Baltimore Orioles, into thinking
they are a low-cost reseller of stuff made in Red China. Another example: My
partner & I used to have a lot of building insulators as
clients. They tended to have niches based on types of customers,
not types of jobs that required specific supplies, equipment and
expertise. Many of them wouldn't compete outside their
self-prescribed list of job types, and when things went bad in
their niche (warehouses, old homes for retrofit, recent homes for
upgrades, for example) they couldn't see that the other jobs were
potential work, too.

Frequently the response of an environment to pressure or
resources you apply is not linear. Sometimes you need a critical
mass to achieve your goal...run a few ads, no response; run twice
as many, no response; run twice again as many, some response; run
the same number again, flood of buyers. A lot of models work like
that example. Which is not an argument, btw, to just throw money
at things and hope it works out.

Richards changed the mind-set of Oriole executive management
and created a long-term powerhouse, in part by getting them to
see themselves in a broader light and to see that they could do
More With More. Is your organization's "leadership"
missing opportunities to see themselves in a different strategic
position. Could they, for example, do More With More and possibly
succeed where they have been trying to do more with less and
falling consistently short?

10/31/2003 02:24:00 PM posted by j @ 10/31/2003 02:24:00 PM

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Part II: Baseball Evolution--Project Mangle-ment

Now that the games are over, a very popular topic for
sportswriters, especially those in New York's metro
agglomeration, is to start writing about the business angles of
baseball. Not a lot of management grist there, mostly just money,
which itself does have some impact on management styles
and choices, though the stronger the management in an
organization, the lower the ratio of management style money
dictates.

But the Yanks now-inevitable re-tooling is now a prime focus
for ink on paper, blather on blither.

During the Ed
Barrow days of Yankee management (Barrow was the Boston
manager who "invented" Babe Ruth, taking him out of the
starting rotation where he was a all-star caliber pitcher and
sticking him in the outfield so he could get his bat in the
lineup every day), the Yankee (Barrow, really) theory was to fix
a situation before a competitor could identify it as a problem.
This is the reason the Yanks were able to trade players for their
apparent value, not their real-value-next-season.

This off-season, the Yanks won't be able to do that, because
they've already told the world that this 101 win team is a
problem. Yeah, I know it isn't, it's a very good team, just a
team that had a bad three-game stretch. But even very good teams
have to look to the future. The sportwriters are rebuilding this
team on paper as though they were the GMs of a team with endless
resources (okay, we'll get Vladimir Guerrero & Gary
Sheffield, talk Roger Clemens out of retiring, blah, blah, blah).
And the Yanks have both lush resources and a controller who's
willing to invest or even over-invest to get results, but they're
not limitless.

Whatever plan the Yanks put forth, presuming their GM Brian
Cashman is still around, will have succession-planning in mind.
That is, it's not enough to make moves to fix today's
"problems", but to work an overall plan with the future
in mind. Who is good now but will be losing mojo in 2005? What
teams have a player I need now for a player at a position I don't
need now? What guy in the minors can be adequate to be a strong
possibility of replacement for this guy another team is demanding
for the guy on their team I really want? And how much will I have
to pay another team to take Jeff Weaver's contract off my hands?

Beyond baseball, we call this project management, as
the high ratio of readers who are professional project managers
already know. Very few journalists or jock-talk guys have project
management aptitudes, the key one being what I call sequencing.
However, trhere is one writer who has touched on
this subject (and I hope will continue to), and that's Doug
Pappas. On his indispensably fine Doug's
Business of Baseball Weblog, he wrote a recent
entry that touched on the Yankee retooling subject with a key
project management tool, a table of contract commitments to
individual players over time. That is to say, of all the ink (and
electrons) dedicated to this "analysis", Pappas' alone
has started with an actual management approach to the task. Which
how John McGraw built the New York Giants dynasty in the late
teens and early twenties, which is how Ed Barrow learned to do it
and make the Yankees a regular contender from 1920 through the
1950s. Decent succession planning makes problems vaporize before
they happen. Management By Wishful Thinking (MBWT) or Management
By Just Doing Something Right Now (MBJDSRN) doesn't make problems
vaporize before they happen.

It's not enough to throw Vlad
the Impaler at this "problem". It's also a question
of resources over time.

10/29/2003 07:31:00 AM posted by j @ 10/29/2003 07:31:00 AM

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Part I: Baseball EvolutionChanging Your Changes

Nothing in
the universe is constant except for change.
And change changes in direction and rate, constantly -- from
Anaximander

Yesterday's entry was about the inevitable changes being
forced on the Yankee organization from the owner. His repulsive
personality and criminal record aside, his knowledge that change
is a necessity is essential in baseball success and to
organizations outside baseball.

Take the Oakland A's, for example. Most of the readers who
write to me have read Michael Lewis' Moneyball (see my
link in the left-hand link bar if you wonder how my views differe
from his). And Lewis' nifty book was a beautiful snapshot of the
way the A's were designing their approach at a moment in time,
that while recent, is still past. They have mutated their
strategy. The documented offensive theory of patience at the
plate and a total disregard of defense and speed as overpriced
components has mutated into patience at the plate, isolated
power, and a ratcheting up of defensive value to low-not-zero was
the approach they were taking by the end of this year.

Beane and DePodesta tweaked their approach, because they had
to. First, it would do them little good to pursue a theory that
had been made public, since imitators would start bidding against
them, even if only to prevent them from getting what they needed.
Second, they "listened" to the feedback their approach
was making. Defense is not a linear function. Their defense was
so bad, it cost the team games it didn't need to lose and did
need to win. They took care of that and it worked pretty well.
According to Keith Woolner's Defensive
Efficiency report, the A's were the second most
defensively-effective team in the American League this season.
Beane didn't let his Moneyball poor-mouthing of defense
as a skill worth paying for get in the way of tweaking his team
to improve it.

If you're in a competitive environment, you have to change,
even as your competitors are deconstructing what you are doing
now. That's truer in baseball than any other endeavor, but Joe
Ely's Learning About Lean blog has a perfect, informative
example (Oct. 25th) of this in manufacturing. Toyota has a
plant in Indiana that they open for tours, and Ely's been a
couple of times. The Toyota management and work force appear
quite open about what they're doing to improve their processes,
refining their approaches, tweaking their methods. And they're
not afraid of giving away their proprietary advantages to
competitors who might come on a tour, because by the time the
borrower implemented the advantage, the Toyota plant would have
changed and refined it anyway.

If you need to cope with organizational change, follow what
the Yankees are doing (quite publically) during this off-season.
Ignore the viviparous personality crud, the vituperation and
vitriol, and instead watch what they do to try to improve. Scout
out what the A's are doing; it's less public, but you can see who
they draft and what moves they make and ask yourself what
direction they seem to be trying to move in -- are they tweaking,
re-tooling, trying something completely different? And read Joe
Ely's fascinating Toyota write-up. If you're not in
manufacturing, you probably can't replicate Toyota, but you can
parallel what they do in an organized and structured way.

Most organizations won't allow themselves to do it, especially
publically-owned ones (politics, fear, institutional
shareholders). Many that try it fail because they "go
binary", that is, they lose their ability to repeat
successes because they won't document anything, assuming this
environment is about pure fluidity and lack of process (it's
not).

Steinbrenner acting as though he was a sociopath is not a
necessary ingredient in the recipe for constant prevolution. But
the recipe is mandatory. Anaximander knew that over 2000 years
ago.

Anyone who saw Yankee owner Geo. Steinbrenner's face during
the final World Series game, or who saw any of the pictures
fished out of the files by New York papers in their game wrap
stories "know" there is about to be a bloodbath in the
Yankee dugout and front office. And the New York sports pages
(here's one
and another)are
full of Live Autopsy grist, as well. After all, the team won only
101 regular season games and then advanced through a couple of
rounds of playoffs and split the first four games of the Series
before going down. They'll be remembered as being the second-best
team this year, better than merely 28 out of the 30 teams that
started the season with an apparent chance to win it all.

The bloodbath is a ritual in certain organizations, though
it's only in a small a subset of what I call "Theory XYY"
organizations that relish bloodbaths after very successful
periods. Theory XYY shops are run by (usually) men, always with
"family of origin" issues. They grew up in homes where
the dominant parent, usually the father, believed people who got
approval would slack off, so the parent would pit the children
against each other, belittle them to their faces and to each other
behind the victim's back. It's MBT (Management By Terror).

I worked for a boss who was programmed this way. For
him, (I don't believe this is true of all Theory XYY types) there
was sexual component as well. He liked to pick a victim and set
her or him up for a firing for a few weeks or a month. As it
became apparent to each of the rest of the staff that they were
not the next victim, he'd watch them closely to see who showed
the most fear, helping him pick his next victim. This turned
him on, and he'd end up having sexual relations with someone, sometimes a staff member, sometimes a supplier to the company, and then
publicize it.

Over time, of course, people who aren't managed well by Theory XYY approaches tend to
drift away from this, the organization reflecting a selection for other kinds of people. Two interesting things to me (as a people manager) are this: First,
that some people perform better with a Theory XYY executive, and
the second is that some of the managed are immune to this. When I
first observed instances of Theory XYY organizations, they were
crippled and not very competent. I came to believe Theory XYY
organizations were doomed to mediocrity at best.

XYYankees

But the Yankees do quite well. They are competitive, even in
this environment. It would be hard to call them mediocre. They
are, imnsho, the most consistently-excellent organization in
baseball over the last 23 years, and especially since the Joe
Torre ingredient got plopped into the recipe. Torre acts as
graphite rods in the nuclear pile that is the indicted felon who
owns the team. But while you can belittle the owner as a
despicable person, his technique has not caused the team to fail.
And I think the team has done a fairly good job of collecting
players who, while they don't thrive in Theory XYY, are in
that group who can just ignore the bloodletting and resulting
social effects.

Theory XYY is obnoxious and it's practicioners reprehensible
and the employees who thrive in it pitiable. But it's not a
prescription for failure. The three great religions of the Middle
East that dominate the World's faiths and are very strong shapers
of its intellectual traditions all come from Old Testament roots
with a sometimes-Theory XYY deity (just ask Abraham).

I'm confident the Yankees won't be "worse" next
year. They may not get to 2-2 in the World Series, but the
organization with its current Theory XYY ownership can continue
to deliver excellence in terms of ROI and regular season record
and post-season success. Freaky, isn't it.

10/27/2003 06:51:00 AM posted by j @ 10/27/2003 06:51:00 AM

Friday, October 24, 2003

Toxic Environments, Baseball Reporters &The Death of Assessment

I think I wasn't clear enough yesterday in my connection between internally toxic environments based on second-guessing and Yankee manager Joe Torre's choice to leave 2003's Punching Bag of the Year Jeff Weaver in to pitch the bottom of the 12th. I got a note yesterday from Gordon Whitesmith asking me to elaborate, so I'll try.

A highly-politicized big-organization environment where every decision that doesn't work out becomes grist for rumors, subversion and erosion of other managers' credibility quickly generates the next logical step: active campaigns every time a decision does work out. Soon, managers are swapping testimonials or other favors to have peers pitch a decision they made to the executive consumers of such storytelling as "genius" or "brilliance", or shamelessly (for those that have the lack of self-restraint required) doing it themselves.

The corporate/military/academic society in which this occurs starts becoming like Pravda or Fox news or the old ABC Wide World of Sports: there are "heroes" and "villains", "geniuses" and "dolts", "winners" and "losers". Simple dualities packaged for simple propaganda techniques. This simplifies consumption for the consumer of such info (in this case, executive management) and that diet slowly (sometimes quickly) converts the consumers' palate to such easy-to-digest pablum.

This binary evaluation results in the death of evaluation itself, at least as something functional. For baseball reporters, it guarantees a readable headline and a story with bite: "Torre Blows Bullpen Decision" or "McKeon's Genius Strikes Back". But in the big organization world, it's a quickly spreading cancer that devours the usefulness of evaluation, and eventually serves to promote those who can best (most-simplistically) package their accomplishments to their executives. And that will be those who either take on the simplest work, or those who take on the work that's hardest to actually measure, or those who have the most time on their hands for self-promotion, because their work is least-demanding.

Eventually, the big organization (I keep saying big because small organizations don't usually generate enough overhead to attract people who thrive in this social system; & a mom-&-pop grocery store with two clerks is always going to know who does their work how well) completely loses its ability to evaluate people on anything that matters. They become the Sports Page of an afternoon paper.

It's the death of evaluation as a benefit.

10/24/2003 06:46:00 AM posted by j @ 10/24/2003 06:46:00 AM

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Surviving Toxic Environments:Joe Torre -- Human HazMat Suit

The Yankees lost last night.
They've gotten all the way to a World Series, they're tied at 2 wins each, and they hold the home field advantage. If you read sports columnists'
jeremiads, you'd think Joe
Torre, the 5th-winningest (percentage) baseball manager of all
time, was a frelling moron.

The Yankees lost last night.
Playing in Miami, they came back late in the game to tie it, held
the Marlins through 9, and went into extra innings against the home team.
Home teams have specific tactical advantages. Like the debate
team that goes last, they can tweak their approach to the
situation and respond to whatever the first team did. This is why
every season the home team will win ~.545 - .550 of the games
played. If the home team enters the bottom of the 9th with the
game tied, their chances of winning smash through that range,
because unlike the rest of the game, a single run guarantees
victory. Strategies that are net-negative for winning a game when
you look at their composite value (sacrifice bunts, many kinds of
hit and run plays, sending marginal baserunners for an extra base
on a hit, swinging for the fences on every decent pitch) become
net-positive because the conditions for winning get stripped down to one simple objective: acquiring a single run.

The Yankees lost last night.
Going into extra innings tied, they were at a terrible
disadvantage to the Marlins, who could swing for the fences, or
play little ball, or run the bases like drunken sailors on a
last shore leave before being shipped out to the Middle East for
a couple of years. Torre had used his best reliever, Mariano
Rivera, for a couple of innings the night before, and if he'd
entered the bottom of one of those extra innings with a lead,
would have used Rivera up some more to protect it. But the
Marlins kept slipping through Yankee half-innings. Torre first
used Jose Contreras for a few innings. Contreras didn't have his
best stuff, but was good enough. And Torre pinch-hit for
Contreras in the top of the 11th during a rally the Fish finally
aborted without yielding a run. Torre brought in the Yanks'
least-successful starter of the season, Jeff Weaver. And Weaver
looked like last year's Weaver. He was throwing hard breaking
stuff for strikes and mowed down the Marlins in order in the
bottom half of the 11th. And when the Yanks didn't score in the
top of the 12th, he rolled Weaver out again. And the first
hitter, Alex "Sea Bass" Gonzalez, swung for the fences
and hit a homer. Which can happen to any pitcher, including
Rivera, in the home half of an extra-inning game.

The Yankees lost last night.
Based on some of the NY press response (most ignorant example
being this
one, courtesy of Baseball
Primer), you'd have thought Torre had lost the game.
All that superstition about destiny and mystique has gone to
their heads, perhaps, and they'r forgetting about the vast home
team advantage in extra-inning games. And in their heart-thumping
fear of losing (take some Paxil guys, alright?), they create a
toxic environment for a manager.

In toxic environments where every managerial choice or action
is subject to 20-20 hindsight (corporate, military, non-profit
are most frequently subject to this one) any choice that doesn't
work out will be dragged around the building for a couple of
days, like Achilles' corpse at the walls of Troy, till it's a
stinky minute steak. The attackers usually aren't people who have
to make decisions themselves, in fact, the people who start this
behavior tend to be people who consciously avoid positions that
require committing to a decision. And once this ethos takes hold
and is rewarded by executive management, everyone, even
people who don't like to play that toxic waste-spraying game,
pretty much have to play to stay afloat.

The social standards for evaluation mutate in that environment. Actual analysis fades as a technique, and a simplistic binary evaluation emerges: managers become "winners" and "losers" and become so on the basis of a recent decision that worked out or didn't. Managers become "geniuses" or "dolts" based on one tactical move (for the obverse to the goofy New York column I referred to previously, check out this goofy Philadelphia/San Jose column). Rats imprisoned in Skinner Boxes show more sophisticated cognition.

The New York sports news and fan environment is extremely
toxic in this way (the owner himself contributes an extra
helping), and Torre has done a nifty job over the years in
buffering his players from it. But he's still going to take a lot
of hits himself. If he had used Rivera on this consecutive night,
he'd have been taking the exact chance Grady Little had taken
using Pedro in the game last week...you go with your best even
when you're overusing him. That Little maneuver didn't work out.
Either choice can work and either can blow up in your face.
That's management.

TIP:In your own organization, absorbing the toxins yourself to
protect underlings will work to some degree. But you really have
only two choices long-term. If you care about doing a good job
and delivering a group's good work, you can 1) evacuate the toxic waste dump you work in, or 2)
fight to convert the social reward system of blame-attachment.
You do the latter by calling the blamegamers every single time,
not by blaming them for their own decisions that didn't work out.

I recommend the first choice. It's easier. And toxic organizations don't deserve good managers.

10/23/2003 07:57:00 AM posted by j @ 10/23/2003 07:57:00 AM

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

They've shown
me ways to lose I never knew existed
-- Casey Stengel on the early New York Mets

Sometimes when an employee fails to achieve the results you
both hoped for, it her fault. But more frequently it's one of
those "Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the
bug" moments, where she did her best under your direction
and things didn't work out. In these cases, bad managers will
make the team member a lightning rod to avoid any responsibility
himself. Good managers will take on responsibility themselves
while pointing out the random factors involved. The best managers
master misdirection and deflection, owning up to the failure, but
neither trashingt he player nor absorbing the full hit himself.

Baseball has some illustrative examples of the technique. Casey
Stengel is by far the best.

Stengel was always a screwball as a player, patroling the
outfield for more than half the National League franchises He was
a good-enough, not very good player. But he was incomparable at
using humor or an odd gesture to confuse his critics and redirect
attention to something else.

According to researcher Sam
Person, writing for the Baseball Library, Stengel was booed
by the fans the first game back in Brooklyn after having been
traded away, then back. According to Person, "Casey secured
a sparrow, placed it under his cap, and removed the cap the next
time a chorus of boos greeted him in Brooklyn. It is reported
that when the bird lifted off from his head, Casey turned the
boos to laughter. Conceivably, in so doing, a pattern was set for
many situations that would happen at Ebbets Field over time, as
the Dodgers became loveable losers."

He applied this lesson many times as a player, and when he
became a manager, used it to defuse situations with the hot-house
New York sports press, making himself the wit, the buffoon, the
Pagliacci. When a player would collapse and take down the team in
a game, he trained reporters to come to him for some bon mot
they could use in the first three paragraphs of their story,
instead of tormenting the player (with longer term consequences,
like the installation of additional fear-of-failure).

He was informative and amusing enough that the talk of failure
was diminished (not eliminated), And the by-product of his
showmanship and wit was he became the story, promoting
his own image. He actually marketed himself to peers and
executives and the general public though others' adversity, while
taking heat off them and rarely taking them down in the process.

In a totally unhealthy organization, you can't get away with
this technique. In a totally unhealthy organization, the
permanent attachment of the Tar Baby of blame is a sport in
itelsef, as competitors for attention & glory make sure they
can get ahead of you by pointing out all shortcomings. I call
this Roller Derby Style society (the only way to score points is
to leave someone on their ass or hanging over a rail).

In a somewhat healthy organization you can succeed with
Stengel's approach. Collect and try to invent your own turns of
phrase to use when someone in your group has been diligent but
failed.It doesn't mean you ignore the problem or deny it, but
make your wit the focus of attention and don't let the sharks
take a bite out of your diligent players when things just didn't
work out.

The French
have a wonderful phrase for that moment after an argument is
over when you think of all the things you should have said
when it was going on. They call that moment l'esprit de
l'escalier, "the spirit of the staircase." For
my money, English sorely needs its own word for this and the
German schadenfreude to really qualify as a major
league language.

So that Grady
Little and Dusty Baker can avoid staircase moments in the
future, here are the seven best things Casey Stengel said to
a pitcher who didn't want to leave the game:

7. To
Tracy Stallard, 1963: "At the end of the season they're
gonna tear this place down. The way you're pitching, that
right field section will be gone already."

6. To
Roy Parmalee, who had just been struck by a line drive:
"Make out like it's your pitching hand. I want to get
you out of here gracefully."

5.
Asked by a pitcher why he had to come out: "Up there,
people are beginning to talk."

4. To
Tug McGraw, who said that he got the batter out the last time
he faced him: "Yeah, I know, but it was in this
inning." **

3. To
Ray Daviault, who said he had made a perfect pitch: "It
couldn't have been a perfect pitch. Perfect pitches don't
travel that far."

2. The
pitcher said he wasn't tired: "Well, I'm tired of
you."

1. To
Walter Beck, who wouldn't leave on Stengel's second trip,
July 4, 1934: "Give me the damn ball, Walter."

** - I changed Goldman's text of the quote here to the way
I've always heard this one. His original may be right, or mine
may be.

10/21/2003 07:19:00 AM posted by j @ 10/21/2003 07:19:00 AM

Monday, October 20, 2003

Don Malcolm is one of the most controversial baseball analysts
who persistently breaks new ground in applying numeric analysis
to the study of game. At least one of his inventions makes a
powerful analogy you can transport from the study of baseball to
the study of the performance of any individual, organization or
system. I'll explain the way this metrics mentor applies
contextual analysis to starting pitcher performance with his
system.

First, though, you need to know he picked the Florida
Marlins to be the big surprise team of the year. A fair
number of people, me included, thought they could be very interesting
this year. I had thought they could be very competitive for
streaks. But according to an infographic on a televised playoff
game, the Marlins actually had the best record in baseball this
season after May 23rd (I haven't verified this number; I've found
this un-named network's numbers to be in error a surprising
number of times; they have a "We make it up as we go
along...you just nod, Buckwheat" ethic). The only
commentator outside of South Florida who dared predict a high
level of competitiveness for this team was Don.

Malcolm's interesting public baseball commentary surfaced in
his collaboration in The Big
Bad Baseball Annual, a weighty yearly book
that covered trends for every team and supported the commentary
with metrics both new and inherited from previous Annuals.
The book suffered the fate of much of the deliquescing book
business in The Permafrost Economy, but the work goes on,
appearing, when Don has time, on the book's website.

His masterpiece this year IMNSHO was a
series called Fish Fry, a periodic buffet of analyses of the
Marlins performance over a week. His 8-to-5 work got in the way
of his regular writing after June, though there are a few entries
after that. There are a couple I consider exemplary presentations
of contextual analysis, including this
one. And this
link points at the first in the series, a table-setter. His
writing is drizzled with amusing popular culture references and
acerbic assaults on other baseball researchers and pundits he
considers knee-jerk or shallow adherents to what he calls neo-sabermetrics,
a school of study best embodied by the guys over at Baseball Prospectus.

Anyway, if you click on this
Google search, you can find links to all of Don's Fish Fry
analyses (look in the supporting text of each entry to see which
Week number the entry is...there are a number of duplicate hits).

Masterful Metrics

My most frequent finding of shortcoming in metrics presented
as "truth" or "insight" is a lack of context.
From averages that ignore equally-important aspects such as level
of consistency and confusing the utility of counting stats (RBI,
gross sales $, units-failed) with that of rate stats (slugging
average, net margin, percentage-failed), the single most common
presenter failure is that of including context. In
Malcolm's world, he calls this aspect shape.

So while other researchers try to find a single number to
define a starting pitcher's performance in a single number (for
example, the Game Score metric I referred to recently), Don uses
QMAX, a two-dimensional matrix. On one dimension, he grades a
start by "Stuff", a measure of the rate of
hit-prevention ability in that start. On the other,
"Command", a measure of the rate of walk-prevention.
Once the starter's stint is complete, you can file his
performance in one of these p.o. boxes. The
table here is from his site, and it shows what the aggregate
ERA in 1994-96 was for starters.

There are zones on the QMAX chart...the two with the greatest
success shaded in this table. This matrix is an example of one
thing researchers or anyone presenting metrics should always do:
test the assumptions of the numbers before presenting them. If
you look at this chart, you can see the underlying
"meaning" or level of effectiveness. Malcolm's taken a
commonly-known measure of starting pitcher effectiveness, ERA,
and shown how it works against his more compound system. And yes,
it seems to work...that is, the two shaded areas in the upper
left, the success squares correspond to lower ERA numbers than
the others. He then builds up an entire set of regions on the
table that describe specific kinds of performances (with known
aggregate results).

You can show the results for a team or an individual player
(or a team or a league), by entering the number of starts that
fall into each pigeon-hole, and they quickly indicate the shape
of the pitcher's performance over time. This page
shows a pair of tables of 13-game stretches of Greg Maddux
starts. The two contrast well. You can actually see, given a
couple of minutes examining the method, that he collapsed late in
the season and how. If you just tracked ERA for example, it would
have been harder to notice because by halfway through a season,
there's so much data already stored in the number, each start can
only change it a little. And ERA only indicates generally what,
while QMAX provides indications of why.

If you're interested in performance metrics, spend a little
time with QMAX. Here's a
glossary that explains the evaluation system, the shaded
regions and names for them. If your numeracy is very
low, this might hurt to look at, but I suggest if your numeracy
is very low, you shouldn't be in the metrics game.

I can see a lot of applications for this kind of presentation.
Sales people, for example (one axis for ranges of size of sale,
and the other for ranges of net margin). You would figure out
what your goals are (revenue? weighted by the strategic
importance of the product line? net income?) and make a QMAX
equivalent. QMAX doesn't have to be two-dimensional, it
could be three- or more-, though it would be complex to work
with. But this has a ton

Finally, don't forget to test your assumptions before you
institutionalise your system. In the case of QMAX, Malcolm
aggregated ERA into the matrices boxes, then shaded specific
areas and named them. In the same way, you need to test what each
box means in a measure you know to be important before you start
assigning a "value" to it.

If you're interested in performance metrics, Malcolm's mastery
of context is a great model to emulate.

10/20/2003 06:58:00 AM posted by j @ 10/20/2003 06:58:00 AM

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Pattern Recognition: Manager's Friend& Manager's Hiroshima

An important aspect of managing both processes and people is
internalizing and analyzing the historical performance of them in
the contexts they played out in to try to better judge what to do
now and in the future. A little under half of American managers
do this, and they generally perform significantly better than the
ones who don't. It takes talent, a decent memory, systemic
thinking ability and persistence. It's work. It's essential to
success in any competitive system.

The shorthand term I use for that work is "pattern
recognition".

On the other hand, Grady Little met his Hiroshima in the
deciding game of the A.L. Championship series because of pattern recognition. He took a
chance on leaving his gutsy starter in when it was obvious to him
and everyone else watching that his tank was empty & he was
down to fumes. To most observers, including me, it looked like
one of the most ill-timed brain cramps in the history of playoff
baseball. How could that have happened?

Thanks to my buddy Steve
Manes, we have a more rational explanation. He solved this
riddle for us. Little was applying pattern recognition in the
truest sense. Usually when we apply pattern recognition, we are
using a partial analogy, or cobbling together a pile of parallel
or somewhat-alike past events. Sometimes we luck out and have an
exact or almost-exact duplicate of the situation. The more
identical the past situation is, the more faith we put in our
recognition, even though random factors can cancel it out,
especially with people. Sometimes the identical factors we
recognize don't guarantee the same outcome or even probability of
outcome.

Duck & Cover

Grady Little was cursed by his good memory, because on the
58th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima, August 6, 2003,
Pedro Martí­nez pitched a regular season game against the Angels
that unfolded
almost exactly like Thursday night's. The starter was
breezing with six strikeouts and yielding five hits through five
innings, and he was staked to a three-run lead. Parallel to the
first Thursday homer to Giambi in the 5th, Pedro got rocked for a
single run in the 6th of the Hiroshima Day on a pair of hard-hit
doubles. In the Angel game, he came back and got the next two
outs without any trouble, and in the Thursday game, he mowed down
the next two Yanks with Ks.

So:
Angel game: Hit hard for a run but quick recovery.
Yankee game: Hit hard for a run but quick recovery.

-H Matsui grounded out to
second.
-J Posada lined out to center.
-J Giambi homered to right center.
-E Wilson reached on infield single to first.
-K Garcia singled to right, E Wilson to second.
-A Soriano struck out swinging.

The difference was Giambi's second home run, on the one hand
indicating Pedro's additional vulnerability, but on the other
hand, there was Enrique Wilson's "infield single" which wasn't an
actual hit but a bad hop combined with an error on the first
baseman (errors are politically hard to call for official scorers
-- a great topic for another entry). But the parallels are
striking. Pedro was stirred, not shaken, though he was clearly some
pitches beyond his best command. And against the Angels, Little
left him in for the 8th inning:

-J Davanon grounded out to
pitcher.
-A Kennedy safe at first on error by first baseman D McCarty.
-A Kennedy to second on fielder's indifference.
-B Molina popped out to shortstop.
-R Quinlan singled to center, A Kennedy scored.
-D Eckstein doubled to deep left, R Quinlan to third.
-D Erstad hit by pitch.
-T Salmon struck out looking.

It appears to both Steve and to me that Little remembered that
Angel game sequence. Even without his best stuff, Pedro with a
4-1 lead whiffed the side in the 8th, faced adversity (the error
and then the pilfered base without an attempt to stop it), gave
up some hits, lost much of his control (the hit batsman), was way
over his normal, post-injury pitch count limit (about 120 at that
point), and still protected the lead with a dramatic strikeout.
In brief, Pedro was gutty and even without his best stuff and way
over a logical pitch count was able to protect a small lead. In
the Angel game.

So when Little walked to the mound and asked Martí­nez if he
could protect the small lead without his full control and now
over his normal post-injury pitch limit and Martí­nez,
predictably, said 'yes', Little went with a general understanding
that Martí­nez is the best pitcher in baseball, his hopes
(Management by Wishful Thinking) backed with what appears to be a
single strong historical precedent (all the factors just cited)
for this particular situation. And in the Yankee game, it just
didn't work. The Bosox got Hiroshima-ed.

Little's pattern recognition didn't work out this time. Was he
"wrong"? Tough call, sort of a lose-lose. If Pedro had
had a little more good luck or the Yankees a little less good
luck, the outcome could easily have reversed and Little's pattern
recognition skills would have been applauded by many as a gutty
move. Like the intelligence agencies' inaction before 911, it's
really straightforward in retrospect to look at the data that was
available and connect
the dots, but it's much harder to do in the here-and-now. In retrospect, we can make strong arguments about how the situations were different: The Yanks are a better-hitting team than the Angels, Pedro was pitching on six days rest against the Angels, etc. But there are always differences in the baseline situations you use in pattern recognition, always differences people can use to hammer you with when the good (or not) decision you make doesn't work out

But either way, this particular Little Hiroshima is a fine
cautionary example of one of the most dangerous tactical errors
in the application of the pattern recognition skill: the
closer to being identical the current situation is to one you've
already experienced, the higher the confidence in simply
duplicating the solution. With machines (at least those not running under a
Windows operating system), this tends to be effective. With people
and small samples, the illusion of identicality can overwhelm
other, independent factors.

TIP: Use pattern recognition. Experiment with
your people and your processes. But don't be fooled by a
situation that appears "identical" but may not be.

10/18/2003 10:23:00 AM posted by j @ 10/18/2003 10:23:00 AM

Friday, October 17, 2003

12th Hour Resource Management - Grady Little Vs. Grady Little

"Managers
use relief pitchers like the good guy uses a six-shooter.
He fires it until it's empty and then he throws the gun at the
bad guy" -- Dan Quisenberry

There are two things I hate worse than hearing an adult male
telling me he thinks Britney Spears is great entertainment: 1)
being really wrong, and 2) using the same epigram at the top of
two essays.

I just used the Quisenberry quote in yesterday's entry, but it
really was perfectly appropriate for today. As far as being wrong
is concerned, in my last entry, I delivered a conclusion about
Grady Little's resource management approach that was supported by
all available evidence...and was wrong.

In last night's seventh and deciding AL Championship game,
Grady Little rolled out Pedro Martínez to start the game and for
six innings Pedro ripped through the Yankee line-up like a
chainsaw through butter. Eighty pitches by my count. All year,
the Bosox have protected Pedro's injured arm by spacing out his
starts more than most pitchers', and by limiting his pitch count
when he does appear. Eighty, 90, and rarely 100 pitches per start
has been the pattern and his starts where he's had to labor to
100 pitches have been most of the ones where he struggled.

Where Wednesday night, Little finessed a lesser starting
pitcher to get to Pedro, and cobbled together his whole staff to
get through the game to a winning conclusion, in the final
conclusion, it wasn't about preserving resources, it was about
preserving resources until he could get Pedro, the best pitcher
in the major leagues, and then letting riding that horse until
that horse couldn't walk no more. Eighty strong pitches through 6
innings. A healthy but not insurmountable 4-1 lead against a
talented gritty team that's tough in the playoffs.

In the seventh, the Yanks woke up and started hitting. A home
run and a couple of well-hit balls on pitches that didn't hit the
spots Pedro was aiming for. With less control, he was using a lot
of pitches in this inning. He was clearly not the guy he was for
the first six innings. And then one of those flukey plays the
Yanks black magic works on opposing defenses, a bad hop the first
baseman actually got to but then tripped on his way to a
(once-fielded) easy out. Still, he was lucky enough to face the
overrated Alfonso Soriano, and whiffed him to end the inning. Red
Sox 4-2, and a nice way to exit the game.

Little rolled him out for the eighth. The horse broke down,
having exceeded the distance he normally goes and having shown
all signs he was in the midst of breaking down, and Little
allowed him to let the Yanks back in. It doesn't matter that
Pedro is the best pitcher in the world, because Pedro after the
7th inning wasn't Pedro. He was tired, throwing pitches that were
good to hit, and getting worked by the hitters that knew how to
wait for a good pitch to hit (that is, not Soriano). Little had
everyone in his bullpen and a couple of good starters (Wakefield)
to protect the lead, and most of them would have respresented, at
that moment in that game, a higher-performance probability, but
once he got on this horse, he was gonna ride it to the end. And
he did. His team's season ended last night. The Yankees won.

What I interpreted as a resources conservation model was just
a Blind Faith in Totem model -- if Little could just get to
Pedro, that was all he wanted to do. I was wrong.

In your own management, it's easy to ride the best people, the best processes, the best methods, the best technology, the best ideas, to death. In any given situation, what is "the best" (overall) might or might not be the best. It's tempting and pretty immune to second-guessing to stick with "the best" when things are looking rocky. But nothing is "the best" in every situation, context, moment. Management is all about knowing, or guessing well, what is, and having the courage to use all your resources, not even your best ones, to get you to the organization's goals. That's what Grady Little had done Wednesday evening.

In college, I knew a guy who brushed his teeth at least a
dozen times every day. He girlfriend was a friend of mine, and
when he stayed over at her house, he'd brush his teeth there
five, six, seven times. She kept running out of toothpaste and
she'd complain about it (even to me). I'm a notorious
Scot...squeezing value out of stuff before I throw it away, using
paper grocery bags until they look like they'd been through the
Tienamien Square Massacre before I recycle them. But she was so
desperate and freaked out about her toothpaste situation, her
neurotic solution was to take the squeezed out tubes, cut them
open with a scissors, use a toothpick to scrape out toothpaste
residue and paint her toothbrush with it. This isn't Scots
behavior, this is Grady Little Using Pedro on Thursday Night Behavior, and it has nothing to do with
the acumen he'd displayed the night before.

Crud, I hate being wrong

10/17/2003 07:03:00 AM posted by j @ 10/17/2003 07:03:00 AM

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

11th Hour Resource Management - Grady Little Vs. Jack McKeon

"Managers
use relief pitchers like a six-shooter. He fires it until it's empty
and then takes the gun and throws it at the
bad guy" -- Dan Quisenberry

This has been an exceptional year for playoff games. The level
of drama has been operatic (and the level of Greek tragedy has
been Sophoclean). More great games to watch than any year I can
remember: see-saw lead games, one-Pudge Army single-handedly
turning things around games, freaky Hollywood-movie inning games,
sweating bullets games, and a scarcity of blowouts. And one other
thing, something that provides non-baseball managers an
interesting scenario to study and show tactics under pressure.

This was the first year in baseball history where it took the
playoff competitors in both leagues seven games to decide the
pennants. Now, there weren't always playoffs. And even when they
were instituted, it wasn't until '85 that the leagues expanded
the playoff to best-of-seven from best-of-five. Nope, the losing
teams have never shown, nor even had to show, so much collective
gumption and sticktoitive-ness as in this unusual season.

Best-of-Seven is really quite different from Best-of-Five,
especially when it comes to handling pitching. If he's been lucky
to have clinched going into the last week of the regular season,
a respectable manager can line up the first-round best-of-five
game playoff rotation so his best pitcher starts game #1 and is
available for #4, too, while his second best is available for #2
and #5. And if the two best starters have good outings, the
bullpen can get recharged over 5 days of relative rest (two days
between end of season and first playoff game, two days of playoff
games, one day of travel after the second playoff game). If the
team is battling to get into the playoffs, they aren't usually
lining up for the future, they're firing off all their guns at
once and exploding into space, as the 20th Century poet John Kay
wrote, and that can have their pitching somewhat spent entering
the first round.

By the time you get to the second round's best-of-seven,
nothing is really lining up well unless you've had a cakewalk in
the first round and swept your opponent. This didn't happen this
year. Both series have gone to the wire. The underdogs in each
series were both faced with life-or-death resource allocation
decisions today. They took opposite approaches. They both won.

Jack McKeon: The Future is Now

Marlins' manager Jack McKeon today started Mark
Redman, a crafty lefty. With the series against Chicago
tied at 3 games apiece, he just has to win this game. It's
reinforced for him personally because he's in his 70s. He didn't
start this year as a manager, he was an in-season replacement
that was an easy choice for a franchise that didn't think they
were going anywhere this year because of their youth and because
McKeon was already in the organization. But McKeon may not live
forever, and he knows it. As my buddy Martin Marshall would say, Carpe
Diem.

So to win today's game, he put every pitcher except
yesterday's starter on notice they could be called upon. This
keeps everybody's head in the game, and the Marlins have been
thriving on this tight-team everyone-keyed-up approach since
mid-May...it's what got them from nowhere to the seventh game of
a Championship Series for the pennant.

When the Marlins starter got beaten up some early, he switched
quickly to Brad
Penny, a guy that had been punched up pretty heavily during
the playoffs. The Fish notched some runs, and when they got a
lead they wanted to protect, McKeon called on his best starter of
late, Josh
Beckett, for relief. Beckett had started and won a complete
game 115-pitch (a full helping) game on Sunday (that is, he had
two days rest). And McKeon left Beckett in for 4 innings and that
was long enough to get the team to the ninth inning where they
could use their reasonably effective closer Urgueth
Urtain Urbina who did his job.

Though their rotation is not optimized for the World Series,
Marlins win the pennant using every resource available.

The Jack McKeon Approach:Scrape up every available tool and apply it at the most
likely moment, but leave no resource unapplied. It's an
old-fashioned military theory (no longer fashionable among this
country's military strategists). Worry about the future later.

Grady Little: Conservation for Maximum Total Effect

The Boston Red Sox' manager Grady Little has:

One superb starter who seems burned out for the year,
but even on fumes is a formidable competitor (Pedro
Martí­nez).

Little needs to win two games, not one. Average thinking would
opt for the best chance for today, and leave tomorrow for
tomorrow. That would argue using Martí­nez today for the best
chance now and then, if you won, scraping together what you could
for a 7th game. But Pedro is tired, he pitching on fumes. His
velocity is down and he's been hittable, and he hasn't been
pitching on 3 days rest (what he would if you started him today),
or 4 days rest. In fact, through a big part of the season, he was
pitching every sixth day to conserve his Pedro-osity for the
playoffs.

Little pulled what bridge players call a finesse. His thinking
is to really win (the championship) he doesn't need to win today,
he can only do it by winning both. So rather that shoot the moon
with a tired Martí­nez followed by a mediocre Burkett, he decided
to roll out a rested Burkett today (he's not going to get better
with one more rest day) and have a probability of a better (more
rested) Martínez tomorrow.

The Grady Little Approach:Bring to bear the maximum value over time without
regard to optimizing against any one event. It's the healthy
agricultural model, that aims to keep yields high year after
year, even if that approach misses out on a single bumper
harvest.

In Your Organization...

...You'll face back-against-the-wall situations where you have
to apply resources to achieve the optimum yield. Personally, I
usually favor the Grady Little approach (life is a marathon, not
a sprint), although I use the McKeon approach when I have no
choice. But I always consider both approaches every time,
think both through, before picking one to apply. Neither is
always right. Tomorrow, Little will be in a 7th game and he'll be
in a position where he might have to use McKeon's approach.
McKeon won, but he only has two days off before the World Series
and his rotation is dis-optimized which can be costly against the
caliber of team the Marlins are going to face.

Both approaches have virtues and vices. Apply them
thoughfully.

10/15/2003 11:15:00 PM posted by j @ 10/15/2003 11:15:00 PM

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Team-Building LessonsFrom Kevin Towers

Baseball has so many excellent lessons for team-building
because it's central (long-term success in the game depends completely on it),
and conspicuous (it's all right out in the open). Well, conspicuous to some degree. Reasons for some moves are obvious, but others seem cryptic.

Baseball Prospectus' Jonah Keri has been conducting
very smart and pithy interviews with major league teams' G.M.s. This
week, though, he outdid himself with a two-part interview
of Kevin Towers, the San Diego Padres' general manager.

The Padres have a weird past. Nepotism in the front office,
some of the ugliest
uniforms ever unleashed on an unprepared public, firing one
of the best
managers in history, Dick Williams, for no apparent reason
after a winning season and just a year after taking them to their
first World Series, and a cornucopia of incoherent player
signings. That's the past, but Towers is the present.

Towers has been looking awfully sensible building the team
over the last couple of years as it prepares to move into a new
ballpark. His approach, made explicit in the Keri interviews,
reveals some great foundation for team-building in your own
organization.

TOWERS LESSON ONE: Know the competitive
and environmental landscape you expect your team to play in.

Keri asked him how he thought the new park would play. His
answer in part was:

Kevin Towers: I hope it's a
pitcher's park. We studied clubs going into new parks over
the last few years, and we found that a few clubs, Seattle
and San Francisco especially, had some success in pitcher's
parks. There are factors we won't know for sure until we get
in there of course. The wind direction we won't know for
example. It will be tough to hit homers to the gaps, and will
probably favor left-handed pull hitters: It's 410 feet to the
right-center field gap, with a short porch in right field at
325, plus 395 to center, 385 to the gap in left-center. It's
330 down the line in left, with a building--the old Western
Metals building--in play there. The two corner outfielders
will probably have to be pretty good athletes, considering
how big the gaps are, plus there are quirky spots in the
corners. There's only about six to eight feet of foul
territory in spots, so if you're in a dead sprint toward the
line you'll have a hard time stopping before you crash into
wall.

It's obvious he's given a lot of thought to the place his team
will play half its games. He's thought about what kind of players
he needs, and the defensive demands of a couple of positions. He's
scripted scenarios based on the environment, and thought about
ways to prevolve to meet what the environment gives his team and
what it tends to take away.

TOWERS LESSON TWO: Prepare a plan with a
clear ideology, but be flexible in its application.

I mentioned that the park is going to favor
left-handed hitters. I'm a big believer that you can never
have enough left-handed hitters or left-handed pitchers.
Players with pull power should get the biggest advantage out
of the new park; somebody like Kotsay with gap power may
struggle a bit more. But Giles and Klesko, it should favor
them because they have pull-type power. I'm a little
concerned with moving Klesko to a corner spot though because
of how difficult we expect it to be to play outfield defense
in left and right. What we'd like to do is get into the park
in December, see which outfield position is more difficult,
put Giles in that corner, Klesko in the other.

Through he's convinced Giles is a better
outfielder than Klesko, they're going to experiment in the actual
park...they're not going to let preconceived notions of the two
outfielders' skills dictate who plays where.

TOWERS LESSON THREE: Be realistic, don't
manage by wishful thinking, everyone has weaknesses, so know them
and work around them without rancor.

Towers' words here are fantastically mature and something that
makes for an exceptional manager in any organization.

Overall I think we've improved our outfield
defense with Kotsay and Giles out there, but with Klesko,
left field or right will be tough--it'll be a struggle for
him defensively. An option would be to trade someone like
Klesko, but we don't want to give up that offense from our
lineup. With Giles-Kotsay-Greene-Burroughs we're a
much-improved ballclub (defensively). With
Loretta-Nevin-Klesko we're below-average there, so hopefully
our pitchers will try to prevent opposing hitters from
pushing the ball to the right side.

He has the guts not only to recognize some of his players have
specific "weaknesses," but he presents them as
"realities", without rancor. He even has the insight to
recognize a player like Mark Loretta, with a decent rep for his
defense, is actually not very good at it. And he's willing to just say
it. It's realistic but courteous, the kind of exposure that
allows team members to hear their evaluation and at the same time, to strive to improve themselves.

TOWERS LESSON FOUR: Aim high, but do
your homework and wherever human beings are involved, be
prepared for results different from what you planned. Blend the
statistical and the human factor analysis, and ignore neither.

The trade for Giles was a big deal for the smaller-market
Padres. Pulling the trigger on that deal puts a G.M.'s neck on
the block.

BP: When you looked into trading for
Giles, you were talking about a player already 32 years old,
with multiple years left on his contract. What types of
studies or research did you look into in terms of players
with similar profiles aging well?

Towers: The beauty of the contract
is that it just takes him until he's 34. Age 32 in our
research is when players start to drop off. But for the
remaining two years of his contract, we felt the protection
we could put around him, with him coming home and feeling
comfortable, he had a chance to put up comparable or better
numbers for a few more years.

Towers and his front-office team did their homework, looking
at both the statistics and the human factors in deciding to add
this individual to their team.

TOWERS LESSON FIVE: Be hopeful but
realistic about team members without a lot of track record.
Monitor them, give them chances to succeed, but don't overlook
their weaknesses or hesitate to move them out of the picture
eventually if they don't perform well enough.

The Padres started the year with rookie Ramon Vazquez getting
a shot to play middle infield. The Padres gave him a chance, but
after a season, they realize his limitations and are looking to
give Khalil Greene, a highly-touted prospect, a shot at the job.

BP: You've got the young pitchers to
work into the mix, but you're going with some young position
players as starters too. Looking at someone like Khalil
Greene, his numbers from any given level don't necessarily
jump out at you. What is it that you like about him that
makes you confident he can do the job starting at short as
soon as next season?

Towers: His defense is his biggest
plus right now. We've had some problems with players with
horrible range factors. Khalil will be our number-eight
hitter next year; he'll eventually hit, but he may not
fulfill his full potential with the bat for a couple of
years. What he can do with the glove already though--he's got
tremendous range to his left, to his right, he can turn the
double play. Khalil can be a .220-.230 guy for now, maybe hit
up to 10 homers, and improve as he goes. I see Ramon Vazquez more
as a very good utility player. Vazquez lacks range, and he
doesn't have power.

Again, no rancor. Towers isn't mad at Vazquez for who he
isn't. Towers sees in him a set of aptitudes that offer the team
some opportunity (that is, his low salary and actual abilities
make for a good, useful utility player).

I don't know if Kevin Towers and his front-office team will
contribute to the Padres having a great upsurge in their quest
for a title. But I do know he's thinking, and talking, about it
like an exemplary manager. His lessons make tremendous sense to
anyone building a team in a non-baseball organization.

It was ironic - and
pathetic - that anyone connected with the Yankees
Entertainment & Sports Network crew would express concern
for Don Zimmer following Pedro Martinez's Saturday takedown.

Remember, all the YES
voices working on what seemed like an endless postgame show
following ALCS Game 3 - Michael Kay, Bobby Murcer, Suzyn
(Georgie Girl) Waldman and Paul O'Neill - stood by silently
in June when George Steinbrenner ordered YES suits not to
show Zimmer on any Yankee cablecasts.

Where was their concern
then? Guess these voices had a sudden case of amnesia
Saturday night when they offered their take on the
Zimmer-Martinez tango. Demonizing Martinez was in the
Yankees' best interests. Now YES - with Steinbrenner no doubt
loving it from Tampa - was all-Zim-all-the-time TV.

Kay, from the start, was
obsessed with one question: "Why didn't one Yankee come
to Zimmer's aid and hammer Martinez after he flung Popeye to
the turf?" Murcer tried explaining what goes on when
dugouts empty. So did O'Neill. The discussion had its merit.
What they all neglected to address was the wisdom of Zimmer
taking it upon himself to play the enforcer role. In their
effort to crucify Martinez, Zimmer got a free pass.

If the YES voices wanted to
take that route, they should have made a tiny effort to
strike some balance. Instead of saying, "Pedro should
have sidestepped him (Zimmer)," Kay should have asked
Murcer or O'Neill: "What would you have done if some
enraged lunatic - even if he was 72 - came running at you
loading up to throw a left hook?"

As Yankeecentric as that
discussion was, it was objective compared to what came next.
All pretense of YES being a network providing two sides of a
story went out the window when Waldman, and Yankee prez Randy
Levine, turned YES into Al-Yankzeera.

Waldman asked "an
angry" (her words) Levine what he thought of what
transpired at Fenway. Levine, in a performance that would've
made Baghdad Bob jealous, launched into a tirade that went
unchallenged by Waldman. Levine (think he was under orders
from Steinbrenner?) seized total control of YES and used it
to spew pinstripe propaganda.

<snip>

Waldman lost her cool,
joining Levine in piling on Fenway security. She also put out
bad info saying: "We all know this guy (the
groundskeeper). He's been in the bullpen all year. His name
is Dave." Waldman obviously did not "know this
guy" intimately because his name is Paul
Williams.

It's a fine piece. Read the whole thing.

It's welcome, but alarming, that the two most sensible press
voices on this are both from New York. Maybe it's the "Only
Nixon Can Go To China" or "Only Clinton Can Dump
Welfare" rule, but reading this makes me wish Raissman wrote
for my local daily.

10/13/2003 07:37:00 AM posted by j @ 10/13/2003 07:37:00 AM

Sunday, October 12, 2003

To Bleeding Heart Readers: Skip This Entry

I have forsworn writing randomly about baseball topics that
weren't management-related, but a playoff-mêlée yesterday triggers a couple of things that I need to say about
bad human judgement. This is only vaguely related to management
and significantly on the way events get spun inside all kinds of
organizations.

Yesterday in the Yankees-Red Sox playoff game, several
preliminary torts led to thrown ball whizzing over a Yankee
batter's ducking head which triggered a dugout-emptying Man Dance.
Yankee coach Don
Zimmer, now that he's no longer a sub-competent manager, and
has become a very useful complement to Yank manager Joe Torre's
advisory team, has transubstantiated from his old press image as a mediocre
Mr. Potato-head to a Lovable Old Genius. Back when he was
managing, his lack of verbal acuity and total inability to manage
different personalities (Torre's greatest strength) or in-game
pitching decisions and beady-eyed ultra-suspicious, public
nose-picking behavior made him a favorite target of the press.
Now though, his personality has lightened up, he has a bit of
authority and no responsibility and his greatest managerial
strength, in-game tactics, comes in very handy to the
organization the national press considers the most important team of all.
He's colorful -- he has a plate in his head from a beaning he
suffered while a minor leaguer. So he's useful for quotes, and
pretty harmless, and has a lot of Bitgod (back in the good old
days) stories, and everyone loves a guy with a plate in his skull
who had the courage to keep playing the game though any knock
could have been his last moment on earth. Reporters eat up that
Bitgod stuff (they need filler all the time). And reporters love
a good Made For TV Movie plotline, like good-v-evil, because it
doesn't require either the writer, the editors, or the readers to
do much actual analysis or thinking. Which leads us to back to
yesterday's game.

Anyway, the Lovable Old Genius made a terrible mistake during
the Man Dance, and got himself hospitalized. And all the national
baseball press seems to think he's blameless for the mistake.
Which he has to be because he's Lovable. And the person
who teamed up with him in the mêlée is being held to blame. Which he
has to because he's Irascible to the press and English is his
second language anyway. And he's pretty swarthy, which might be a
contributing factor in the gestalt of Lovable Old (White) Guy As
A Victim Of These Terrible Times.

When the Man Dance started, the 72-year-old Zimmer charged the
mound, inhabited by one Pedro J. Martí­nez. Zimmer weighs in at
about 235 or 240, Martí­nez at about 160 (though he claims 170).
Martí­nez, charged with adrenaline, sees a guy who outweighs him
by 45-50% bearing down on him at a (slow) rate, and pushes Zimmer away in a
judo-like way that was relatively gentle (no fist) though definitely intended to put him down on the ground and out of the
picture. Not nice.

Press reports have jumped to the Lovable Genius' defense. He's
72! He's Lovable! He Was Justified!

Baloney. What's a 72-year old lardbutt with a plate in his
skull doing charging the frelling mound with his fist raised
during a heavily-populated mass-rumble? What's wrong
with that guy? Did he think he could
tackle/hit/pummel/push/spit-on/whatever an opposing player and
not be messed up in the process?

For those readers who are binary-thinkers (there has to be a
good guy and a bad guy so if Angus is saying Zimmer was being a
moron, he must believe Martínez was justified and
"good"), I don't think Martí­nez was "good".
But think through the problem. What
are his choices?

Run? That video
would play on every opponent's scoreboard screen for the rest of
his career. Everyone who saw Max Alvis run from a giant rat all
the way from his defensive station at 3rd base and completely off the playing field
of Cleveland's Memorial Stadium never let Alvis forget that
for the rest of his career. In fact, if you say "Max
Alvis" to any fan of the 60's Indians, their first thought
is always "chased like a sissy out of Memorial Stadium by
giant rat"

Let himself get hit by a
charging guy who outweighs him by 70 pounds? Uh,
irresponsible to his teammates, since he's the best pitcher in
baseball, and his team's second-best pitcher is unpredictable.

Recruit Jimmy Carter to get a
mediator and negotiate their differences?

What the pitcher did was not "good", but there were no available "goods" once Zimmer was allowed to complete his charge to the mound.

The national TV and
sports press were uniform in their excoriation of the Boston
pitcher, though none suggested an alternative approach to
resolving the mound-charging that didn't involve someone getting
hurt. One New York reporter, Newsday's Shaun Powell, had the wisest assessment of the situation. It's interesting because Powell, even as a
member of the Yankee press crew, and apparently too young to have
interviewed Zimmer in Zim's beady-eyed, public nose-picking days,
was able to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way.

Beyond baseball, this happens, too, and
for a reason I haven't isolated yet, most often in academic and
military settings. A teacher (non-com) who is a troubled man or
woman who has made life miserable for consecutive waves of
students (soldiers) for many years announces retirement, and
suddenly everyone gets dewy-eyed about their past antics,
romanticizes their leadership and performance.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing to
institutionalize the good things that bad ex-managers
have done, because most bad managers will have done some
good things. But it's equally important that the organization
remembers what the outgoing teacher/non-com did that was
dysfunctional, and call it that, because the opportunity to
replace that miapproachppraoch with a more functional one must
hindered hinded in a dewy-eyed lovefest for the Lovable Old Genius.
Rites of passage are important in changings of the guard, and you
should always tear aside the veil of predictable cultural
responses and simplistic emotional folklore to analyze the real
fabric of what the outgoing boss did and what needs changing.

10/12/2003 10:52:00 AM posted by j @ 10/12/2003 10:52:00 AM

Friday, October 10, 2003

Part IV (and last)- 3 Knowns of Innovation:Fighting for Control of Foul Territory

To repeat...Innovation is a process that turns surprises into
(generally) unknowable trends.

This is the final part of my discussion of the recent Cincy
Enquirer story about the Reds' future direction as a response
to recently-publicized innovations, and the Three Knowns of
Innovation. Today, I'm finishing up with the third
"known".

Knowable #3: Attempts to
Innovate in a Large Organization Almost Inevitably Triggers the
Most Intense Politicking.

The Enquirer writers start their interesting story like this:

When Reds chief operating
officer John Allen said this week that one of the main
criteria for hiring the next Reds general manager would be to
find the person who can find "baseball players," he
was speaking in code.

And the "code"
can be broken by anybody who has read the best-selling book Moneyball
about the Oakland A's methodology for winning games with a
comparatively small payroll. Allen is looking for a general
manager capable of applying the Oakland A's and Minnesota
Twins models of being able to do more (i.e. win) with less
(i.e. a bottom-quartile payroll).

Both teams have moderate
payrolls, in line with the Reds' 2003 payroll when the season
started. And both have been successful, though using slightly
different strategies. The question: What can the Reds take
from those organizations and apply in Cincinnati?

Allen didn't return a call
for the portion of this story about Oakland, but
conversations between the Enquirer and Reds insiders
Johnny Almaraz and Brad Kullman indicate the Reds already had
begun guiding themselves toward being a leaner, smarter
organization before general manager Jim Bowden and manager
Bob Boone were fired in July.

When the writers of a daily
newspaper article start a story with the key actor (in this case,
Allen) but soon tell you he didn't talk to them for this story,
they're speaking in code. Anyone who's worked for a newspaper for
a while can break this code for you. Either Allen used the
writers to float a case to try and convince his superiors
(building enthusiasm from season-ticket buyers and other
influencers, all while maintaining deniability), or the real
informants (in this case, Almaraz and Kullman, who did
speak to the writers on the record) are floating their case to
the same audience in an attempt to point Allen in the right
direction because they haven't been able yet to persuade him
through the traditional internal means.

The Reds are one of the
noteworthy disappointments of the National League. They opened
their new ballpark but got no apparent kick out of it...they are
still struggling as a medium-bad team. They've blended a lot of
young talent with a couple of veterans and a former superstar and
basically have drifted sideways for several years. Personally, I
think their biggest cause of failure isn't something that was
their "fault". Their former superstar, Ken Griffey
Junior, has deliquesced since they traded for him. He was always
a more-fragile than average player, but since he's come to the
Queen City, he's put up fewer games every year (from 145, to 111,
to 70, to 53 this season). As Junior tries harder to make up for
lost time, he's pushing his body harder than it can take and
breaking it again and again. When he plays, he's pretty good (no
longer superstar calibre). When he goes down, a big hunk of their
payroll is sitting on the disabled list, and that's often.

It looks like people in the
Redlegs' organization are looking for a system to get them out of
their difficulties and are campaigning in the Enquirer to
overcome internal resistance. Pitching to influencers is a
typical, and frequently successful, part of a political campaign
for or against an innovation. It's particularly fertile right now
because the Reds fired both their manager and general manager in
July and are likely to replace both interim solutions in place
now. Whatever theory wins the day is likely to get a good set of
roots down, so the stakes are high, both for the innovators and
the defenders of more traditional methods.

Attempts to Innovate
Trigger Defense of the Status Quo

Whether in or out of baseball,
any attempts to seriously rework existing systems trigger an
immune response from three sets of steak-holders...(a) those who benefit from the status
quo, and (b) those who fear change, and (c) those who don't
understand the proposed innovation value their personal comfort with the status quo more than the health of the organization suffering from the status quo's ineffectiveness. The more
success a big organization has, the higher the resistance, but
even organizations that are imploding and know it can have a very
difficult time getting everyone in line. In very competitive
organizations, there are some players who would rather have the
whole place go down in flames than allow a rival to succeed,
although that's not the norm.

The big-organization politics
around innovation will exceed the total of the all the following
combined: the dire nature of the current situation + the virtue
or weakness of the proposed innovation + the demand from
customers and suppliers for the innovation or its products.

The Reds, ultimately, will be
making changes in the way they do business. Their ballpark didn't
prove the windfall ownership believed it would be, and their main
owner is a competitive person who wants results. The Junior
situation is ugly enough that it's likely the organization will
do something to change the situation. They do have a
large cadre of promising young talent.

The question is, can
counter-innovation forces hold off change for a season or three
more? As interesting as it will be to see what particular system
the Reds try to adopt, the public war for the hearts and minds of
the influencers will be as interesting to those who like to study
the sociology of organizational innovation. If you are interested
and don't currently make a habit of reading the Cincy sports
pages, it could be a real feast as it unfolds for the next few
weeks or even months like a game of Risk or Diplomacy. Would it
be any different in your organization?

10/10/2003 10:16:00 PM posted by j @ 10/10/2003 10:16:00 PM

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Innovation is a process that turns surprises into (generally)
unknowable trends.

For the last couple of days, I've discussed the recent Cincy
Enquirer story about the Reds' future direction as a response
to recently-publicized innovations, and about the three "knowns"
of innovation. Today, I'm continuing on the second
"known".

Knowable #2: Halfway Innovation
Is More Likely to Half-Drown You Than Half Rescue You or
There Are Few Giraffes With 4-Foot Necks.

When a general manager with a strong team-building ideology
takes over an organization, it's rare that the team reflects his
views very quickly. The Major League club has a roster that
usually doesn't reflect the new guy's point of view (because it's
unlikely a team would fire a G.M. to pave the way for a
soulmate). Even the farm system is stocked with the previous regime's design. Yes, G.M.s do retire and teams will sometimes hire a
deputy or ally of the incumbent, but more often than not, the new
guy was brought in to invent something different.

The Reds, if you can believe the Enquirer story I linked to
above, are planning to draw their new theory from what the A's
have done and what the Twins have done, two pretty different
strategies both designed to address being competitive with a
small budget.

The A's are using a modern sabermetric analysis to identify
components of the game that are (a) successful at producing runs
on offense or limiting runs on defense, and (b) undervalued in
the marketplace of baseball scouting, so they can (c) reap a
concentrated harvest of players who don't cost much but reflect
the successful aptitude pattern. The A's end up drafting a lot of
players other teams' scouts think are funny-looking and more
frequently, un-athletic compared to other teams' averages.

The Twins appear to me to operate by drafting athleticism
(rewarded in their pinball-machine of a home park), building up
the asset value of players by putting them in the majors early,
and then trading excess talent for inexpensive resources of
others that improve on areas of weakness.

Both theories seem to be working for now (Oakland has made the
playoffs four years in a row, Minnesota two in a row). But
they're different theories.

Whatever Doesn't Make You
Stronger, Kills You

The basic theory behind progressive evolution argues giraffes
were once horses, but there was a competitive advantage among a
breeding population for longer necks so the horse-like organism
could eat off higher sources of food, such as tree branches. Over
time, the environment rewarded longer and longer necks until
voilÃ¡, horse-like creatures evolved into giraffes with 12-foot
necks. But if that logic were true (this is argued in a book
called Neck
of the Giraffe), the fossil record would contain the
intermediates...horseaffes or something in-between, say, a
horse-like pre-giraffe with a four-foot neck. But the fossil
record doesn't. Intermediates have no advantage since horses
would have a relative advantage eating off the ground (giraffes
rarely do this, but it's really fun to watch them when they
do...scary, like a giant folding card-table collapsing in slow
motion) but they wouldn't be tall enough to reap the fruit of
higher branches.

Intermediates suffer in evolutionary competition, in baseball,
and in non-baseball organizations. Trying to do both what the
Twins do and what the A's do is a blend of two successful
systems...that probably won't work. Yes, you can draft for
athleticism. Yes, you can draft for the on-base and isolated
power potential the As look for. But prospects with both are
valued, and more likely to be signed by teams with bigger
resources -- they're just not many undervalued prospects with all
of those aptitudes simultaneously.

This is less synthesis than it is syncretism,
or to make a different analogy, less a solution than an emulsion.
The two are not brought together to make a system, but more a
Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies.

If the new Reds front-office team is really smart and
systemic, they might selectively draw individual traits from the
Twins and the A's that fit together (say, the A's identification
systems with the Twins' coaching methods), but it would be hard,
because over time systems shape their components to complement or
match their other components.

This is why so many behemoth enterprise software systems that
looked so cute in the box caused such meltdowns when deployed.
The ERP software vendor had a whole systemic way to run every
aspect of the purchaser's business. The purchaser already had a
way to run their enterprise. The software won't work in a pure
version of the purchaser's model. The purchaser either had to
convert all their business models and social mores to match the
software-makers ideal (virtually impossible, because the
enterprise would spend virtually all its energy just converting
every shard and shred of its behavior to a different
context...almost no examples of success with this...the closest
being what the Taliban tried to do in Afghanistan). So the end
result is syncretism..cobbling together some behaviors, methods
and mores from the software's model and some from the purchaser's
old model, with the most likely survivors from the purchaser's
model being not necessarily the most appropriate but the
best-defended political bailiwicks.

Other innovations don't face quite such bloody choices, but if
you think about innovations you might have tried or seen tried in
just one department, you know the gravitational field pulls that
way.

Innovation works best when there's a clear vision that
managers get to pursue long enough and in a pure enough way until
it works. Cobbling together little Lego pieces of others' success
is, more often than not, breeding giraffes with four-foot necks.

I'm hopeful for the Reds and my two dear friends Dave Perkins
and Michael Dineen who have both been suffering the Skyline Chili
Five-Way heartburn special over their favorite team for too long.
But I'm skeptical. Successful synthesis is hard.